Ode to the swallow, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)(From Bright wings : an illustrated anthology of poems about birds. New York : Columbia University Press, 2010.)Thou indeed, little Swallow, A sweet yearly comer. Art building a hollow New nest every summer. And straight dost depart Where no gazing can follow. Past Memphis, down Nile! Ay! but love all the while Builds his nest in my heart, Through the cold winter-weeks: And as one Love takes flight. Comes another, O Swallow, In an egg warm and white, And another is callow. And the large gaping beaks Chirp all day and all night: And the Loves who are older Help the young and the poor Loves, And the young Loves grown bolder Increase by the score Loves— Why, what can be done? If a noise comes from one.Can I bear all this rout of a hundred and more Loves?

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Svalor (Swallows) är för övrigt den näst populäraste fågelfamiljen i diktantologin "Bright Wings". Jag återkommer i ett senare inlägg med en presentation av den populäraste.The blue swallows (vers 1-2), by Howard Nemerov (1920-1991)(From The blue swallows : poems. Chicago : Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967.)Across the millstream below the bridge Seven blue swallows divide the air In shapes invisible and evanescent, Kaleidoscopic beyond the mind’s Or memory’s power to keep them there. “History is where tensions were,” “Form is the diagram of forces.” Thus, helplessly, there on the bridge, While gazing down upon those birds— How strange, to be above the birds!— Thus helplessly the mind in its brain Weaves up relation’s spindrift web, Seeing the swallows’ tails as nibs Dipped in invisible ink, writing…

Blue Hydrangeas, September/ by Gillian Clarke (f. 1937)You bring them in, a trug of thundercloud,neglected in long grass and the sulkof a wet summer. Now a weight of wet silkin my arms like her blue dress, a loadof night-inks shaken from their hair –her hair a flame, a shadow against lightas long ago she leaned to kiss goodnightwhen downstairs was a bright elsewherelike a lost bush of blue hydrangeas.You found them, lovely, silky, dangerous,their lapis lazulis, their indigoestide-marked and freckled with the roseof death, beautiful in decline.I touch my mother's skin. Touch mine.

The password, by Anne Stevenson (f. 1933)For PeterMemory, intimate camera, inward eye,Open your store, unlock your siliconAnd let my name's lost surfaces file by.What password shall I type to turn you on?Is this the girl who bicycled to schoolA cello balanced on her handlebars?Shy, but agog for love, she played the foolAnd hid her poems in the dark of drawers.First love of music bred a love of art,Then art a love of actors and their plays,Then actors love of acting out a part,Until she'd try on anything for praise.Siphoned to England, she embraced her dream,With Mr Darcy camped in Hammersmith,Bathed in a kitchen tub behind a screen,Pretending love was true and life a myth.Waking with a baby on her hip,Yeats in her shopping basket, here she is,Thin as a blade and angry as a whip,Weighing her gift against her selfishness.Three husbands later, here she is again,Opposed to her own defiance, breaking rules.Not mad, not micro-waved American,She trips on sense, and falls between two stools,Finding herself at sixty on the floor,With childhood's sober, under-table viewOf how in time love matters more and more.Given a creeping deadline, what to do?Look at the way her wild pretensions end.One word, its vast forgiving coverage,Validates all her efforts to defendEvery excuse she makes, and warms with age.

Still I look for the beauty in songsTo fill my head and lead me onThough my dreams have come up torn and emptyAs many times as love has come and gone

To those gentle ones my memory runsTo the laughter we shared at the mealsI filled their kitchens and living roomsWith my schemes and my broken wheelsIt was never clear how far or nearThe gates to my citadel layThey were cutting from stone some dreams of their ownBut they listened to mine anyway

I’m not sure what I’m trying to sayIt could be I’ve lost my wayThough I keep a watch over the distanceHeaven’s no closer than it was yesterday

And the angels are olderThey know not to wait up for the sunThey look over my shoulderAt the maps and the drawings of the journey I’ve begun

Now the distance leads me farther onThough the reasons I once had are goneI keep thinking I’ll find what I’m looking forIn the sand beneath the dawn

But the angels are olderThey can see that the sun’s setting fastThey look over my shoulderAt the vision of paradise contained in the light of the pastAnd they lay down behind meTo sleep beside the road till the morning has comeWhere they know they will find meWith my maps and my faith in the distanceMoving farther on

I heard the sound again this morning,dawn was a blue tear in the darkand I thought of caravans moving,the pitch and slant of yawning camels,the fall and fold of silken tents,the spurring on of skillful droversthat approaching, scorching, sunand underneath the black djellabaswaist length hair coiled in combs,diamond pins adorning nostrilsevery finger ringed,and hooked upon each little earlobea clump of elfin, clinking bells.

It's trees I look for nowadays,year after yearadding their rings, recordingthis month's frost, that season'sburning, the arrivaland departure of leaves, birds,mice, barefoot invaders,and applecore warsin the kingdom of twigs.

I've discovered an old man's folly,I'm planting giants: wych elm,chestnut, larch a seedcast into the nextlong-shadowed century.I doze in the shadeof a bunya pine, its rootsdeep in the 1880s,bubbling with doves.

Tävlingsdiskar är 21-40 cm i diameter och väger 85-200 gram. Källa: NEThe flight of a frisbee, by Hamish Ironside (f. 1971)(From Thumbscrew No 15 - Winter/Spring 2000.)If you like that sort of thing, the flight of a frisbeeCan be a kind of perfection, like shooting a planeAlong the edge of a door so the shaving curls,Unbroken, with the shiver and snap of snake. However,This is something else: the wobbles and plummetsOf an awkward silver-speckled disc that flashesThe summer’s hottest sun across the vastLawn on which I watch the distant throwers.Yet I am spellbound by the unceasing chasingAnd flailing, the frisbee’s flightless arcs, the girls;Vague and happy limbs and gestures, the sightOf laughter, too far away for me to hear.Too far for me to even see their faces.Only their shadows creep towards me. I couldMove closer; then again, perhaps this isAs close as one can get to love, or should.

Den första ugglan väcker med sitt mytiska läte, ett barn i natten. Poeten Richard Wilbur sätter rim till ropen.A barred owl, by Richard Wilbur (f. 1921)(From Mayflies : new poems and translations. London : Harcourt Brace, cop. 2000.)The warping night air having brought the boomOf an owl’s voice into her darkened room,We tell the wakened child that all she heardWas an odd question from a forest bird,Asking of us, if rightly listened to,“Who cooks for you?” and then “Who cooks for you?”Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,Can also thus domesticate a fear,And send a small child back to sleep at nightNot listening for the sound of stealthy flightOr dreaming of some small thing in a clawBorne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.

Great Gray Owl, by Annie Finch (f. 1956)(From Bright wings : an illustrated anthology of poems about birds. Edited by: Billy Collins, David Sibley. New York : Columbia University Press, 2010.)Who knew you would grow from gray barkSo that nothing is separate or newBut your yellow eyes following throughFrom the mottling brown in the dark,Spectral Owl—from the spiral, the sparkThat the circling feathers lead to?Who knew you could speak as you do,Great Gray Ghost—who knew you could speak?

Jag har redan läst in mig på några av dem. Här får ni några smakprov.KATE TEMPEST (f. 1985) grew up in South-East London, where she still lives. Starting out as a rapper, she toured the spoken word circuit for a number of years, and now works as a poet and playwright. Brand New Ancients won the Ted Hughes Prize for innovation in poetry, and is published by Picador. Source: Publishing companyUr Brand New Ancients, by Kate Tempest(London : Picador, 2013.)The editor looked over his glasses. He had a smile like dog shit hidden in grass, complexion the colour of marshes. He says take a seat and he passes a fat little hand out for Tommy to grasp. Tommy is nervous, all that he’s ever wanted to be is an artist, a wordsmith, a cartoonist, and even though he kind of hates the fact that this gross little man has the power to do this,he’s 26, he knows well enough to smile in all the right places, this might be the chance, and he’s not gonna waste it. He takes himself out to celebrate, allows himself the pleasure of a steak, a nice glass of wine, a giggle ripples up and down the middle of his spine: You did it! says his heart. Shut the fuck up says his mind.

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JEN HADFIELD's second collection, Nigh-No-Place, won the 2008 T S Eliot Prize. With family in Canada and England and a deep love of her adopted home in Shetland, it is perhaps no surprise that her writing is often drawn to the contradictions of travel and home, the music of voices, and the importance of land and place. Source: Scottish Poetry LibraryBlashey-wadder, by Jen Hadfield (f. 1978)(From Nigh-no-place. Tarset : Bloodaxe Books, 2008.)At dusk I walked to the postbox,and the storm that must've passed you earlier todayskirled long, luminous ropes of hail between my feetand I crackled in my waterprooflike a roasting rack of lamb.

And across the loch,the waterfalls blew right up off the cliffin grand plumes like smoking chimneys.

And on the road,even the puddles ran uphill.

And across Bracadale,a gritter, as far as I could tell,rolled a blinking ball of orange lightahead of it, like a dungbeetlethat had stolen the sun.

And a circlet of iron was torn from a byreand bowled across the thrift.

And seven wind-whipped cowsclustered under a bluff.

And in a rockpool,a punctured football reeled around and around.

And even the dog won't heel since yesterdaywhen - sniffing North addictedly -he saw we had it coming -

and I mean more'n wet weak hailon a bastard wind.

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DALJIT NAGRA (f. 1966). My parents are Sikh Punjabis who came to Britain from India in the late 1950s. My elder brother, Daljinder, and I were born and grew up in Yiewsley, near Heathrow Airport. We moved to Sheffield when my parents bought a shop in Gleadless Valley in 1982. Source: daljitnagra.comLook we have coming to Dover!, by Daljit Nagra, tre verser.(London : Faber, 2007.)So various, so beautiful, so new…’- Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’Stowed in the sea to invadethe lash alfresco of a diesel-breezeratcheting speed into the tide, with bruntgobfuls of surf phlegmed by cushy come-and-gotourists prow’d on the cruisers, lording the ministered waves.Seagull and shoal lifeVexin their blarnies upon our huddledcamouflage past the vast crumble of scummedcliffs, scramming on mulch as thunder unbladdersyobbish rain and wind on our escape, hutched in a Bedford van.Seasons or years we reapinland, unclocked by the national eyeor stab in the back, teemed for breathingsweeps of grass through the whistling asthma of parks,burdened, ennobled, poling sparks across pylon and pylon....

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REBECCA GOSS was born in 1974 and grew up in Suffolk. She studied English at Liverpool John Moores University and has an MA in Creative Writing from Cardiff University. Her first full-length collection, The Anatomy of Structures, was published in 2010 by Flambard Press. Source: Publishing CompanyWelcome, by Rebecca Goss(From Her Birth. Chicago : Carcanet Press Ltd., 2013.)

Welcome

to Molly, 2010

For those secret hours, she was just ours. No-one else knew about my breaths(deep, hard, long) to spill her, soft as moleinto the light. Her crawl across my chest to drink untold, we let the world stay furled in sleep to hold her. As dawn swelled behind curtains we thought of a name. It came in chorus, as if we had always known and carried it under tongues for nine months, only now its round vowel released into the room. With your lips at her ear, you let syllables slide into flooded canals, named her over and over while outside, Mersey gulls swooped semi-dark, cawing their applause.

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Avslutningsvis presenterar jag min "vinnare", bland de tjugo.HELEN MORT was born in Sheffield in 1985, and grew up in nearby Chesterfield. Five-times-winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, she received an Eric Gregory Award in 2007 and won the Manchester Young Writer Prize in 2008. In 2010, she was Poet in Residence at the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere. She lives in Derbyshire. Source: Publishing CompanyBeauty, by Helen Mort(From Division Street. London : Chatto & Windus, 2013.)‘. . . is nothing but the beginning of terror’ – RILKE When Beauty stumbled down my road, tapped at my door I saw her from the lounge and hid – her eyes were raw from smoke, her cheeks like dough from where she’d wept and worse, I didn’t like the company she kept: a red-faced drunk who towed a dachshund on a string. Her mouth was slack. She never said a thing, just stood and waited, dropped ash in my rose bed, though as they walked away, she slowly turned her head.For all she had a face made delicate by rain, I told myself I’d never think of her again. Besides, I spent the next year drinking in The Crown. One Saturday, I rose to leave as they sat down.She wore a hat. Her eyes were brighter than before (although I didn’t doubt that it was her I saw, the stale light slung across her shoulders like a shawl, her silhouette drawn sharp against the wall), and though I grabbed my coat, I stood and stalled. I knew I had to ask what she was called. At last she spoke. I felt my hair rise all the same: it’s not the face we shrink from but the name.

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,that is not mine, but is a made place,that is mine, it is so near to the heart,an eternal pasture folded in all thoughtso that there is a hall thereinthat is a made place, created by lightwherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.Wherefrom fall all architectures I amI say are likenesses of the First Belovedwhose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.She it is Queen Under The Hillwhose hosts are a disturbance of words within wordsthat is a field folded.It is only a dream of the grass blowingeast against the source of the sunin an hour before the sun’s going downwhose secret we see in a children’s gameof ring a round of roses told.Often I am permitted to return to a meadowas if it were a given property of the mindthat certain bounds hold against chaos,that is a place of first permission,everlasting omen of what is.

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Jeffrey Harrison visualiserar en annan äng, för er. Notera den vackra "artkompositionen" som förärats fetare stil. Lite annat än Linnés latin, eller hur?The names of things, by Jeffrey Harrison (f. 1957), första halvan av dikten.(Från Incomplete knowledge : poems. New York : Four Way Books ; Lebanon, NH : distributed by University Press of New England, 2006.)Just after breakfast and stillwaking up, I take the path cutthrough the meadow, my mind caughtin some rudimentary stage,the stems of timothy bendinginward with the weight of a singledrop of condensed fog clingingto each of their fuzzy headsthat brush wetly against my jeans.Out on a rise, the lupines standlike a choir singing their purples,pinks and whites to the buttercupsspread thickly through the grasses—and to the sparser daisies, orangehawkweed, pink and white clover,purple vetch, butter-and-eggs.It’s a pleasure to name thingsas long as one doesn’t gethung up about it. A pleasure, too,to pick up the dirt road and listento my sneakers soaked with dewscrunching on the damp pinkish sand—that must be feldspar, an elementof granite, I remember fromfifth grade. I don’t know whatthis black salamander with yellow spotsis called...